A Mandarin-Speaking Undergraduate Student Becomes Research Assistant for Archival Work on Canadian Nursing during Wartime in China.

by Lui Xia Lee

Cross-posted with Trinity Western University.

These past eight months have been one of the most enlightening experiences of my university career. I was given an opportunity to be a Research Assistant for Dr. Sonya Grypma, Dean and Professor of Nursing at Trinity Western University in Langley, BC. Her current research project examines nursing during wartime in China and includes United Church of Canada missionary nurses (1937 to 1950). I was introduced to her by Dr. Marshall, who knew I wanted to do research in the history of China with my Mandarin language skills as well as an interest in research assistance work. This experience has taught me a lot about what it means to be a historian and the skills necessary to be one. This includes planning a trip to the United Church of Canada Archives, self-discipline, and digitizing material. read more

by Sonya de Laat

In the summer of 2018 an unprecedented number of people claiming to be refugees crossed into Canada at unofficial border points. Many Canadians learned of these events through photographs and other visual media circulating through the popular commercial press. Responding to such images, public reaction in Canada has been mixed. While some people support actions aimed at helping these families and individuals, others have sensationalized the situation by labelling it a “crisis” and calling border crossers as “illegals” or “cue jumpers.” read more

Graduate nursing students at McGill, by David Bier (Library and Archives Canada)

Between 1950 and 1968, approximately 300 to 400 “trainees” from South and Southeast Asia — India, Pakistan and Ceylon (present-day Sri Lanka)– came to Canadian universities, learning from the country’s health education systems, and brought back their new knowledge to their home countries.

The Colombo Plan Fellowships are worth acknowledging in the grander tale of Canadian humanitarian aid, as Jill Campbell-Miller argued on Sept. 14, 2018. The historian, a member of the CNHH who also runs the network’s social media presence, gave a presentation to interested members of academia at Carleton University.

During her afternoon talk, Campbell-Miller presented the subtle racial and historical dimensions of the Colombo Plan Fellowships and the changing landscape of health education in Canada.The post-doctoral fellow’s talk was the basis for a paper she hopes to publish. read more

Envisioning Gratitude: Armenian Orphans in Canada

by Sandrine Murray

The Armenian Genocide was the result of the Ottoman government’s destruction of 1.5 million Armenians, most of them citizens within the empire. This was during and after the First World War. Most academics place the beginning of the genocide in 1915, though there are various accounts of violence against the Christian minority in the Ottoman empire before then. The Armenian Genocide is often seen as the first modern genocide, though to this day the term has been rejected by Turkey to describe what happened. read more

by Jill Campbell-Miller, PhD and Ryan Kirkby, PhD, MLIS

In general, historiography and historical methods courses do a good job in teaching students to be skeptical of their sources. As undergraduate and graduate students, we learn to scrutinize what we read, hear, or see. Yet while historians may be familiar with how to critique the sources themselves, rarely do we look up from a given document and examine the place where it is located, or think about how the document arrived in the archives. This is particularly true of written documents that emerge from government. Historians do not always critically engage with the organizational structure of the files, or think about how a certain structure came into being. This might seem somewhat “inside baseball” to historians, who usually leave such concerns in the hands of archivists. Exploring organizational descriptions on archival websites is not for the faint of heart, and rarely make much sense to the untrained observer. But considering these issues is important, because the history of how government departments change over time influences how documents come to be organized, influencing the history that emerges from this research. read more

by Daniel Manulak and Jean-Michel Turcotte

The Canadian Network on Humanitarian History (CNHH) convened its fifth annual workshop during the 2018 Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, hosted by the University of Regina. In attendance were Dominique Marshall, Jill Campbell-Miller, Sonya de Laat, Valérie Gorin, Daniel Manulak, Kiera Mitchell (Technical Assistant), Cyrus Sundar Singh, Yordanos Tesfamariam, Jean-Michel Turcotte, and David Webster. Joining the meeting by Skype were Katie-Marie McNeill, Chris Trainor, and Anne-Emmanuelle Birn.

“Besides the Primate’s World Relief and Development Fund, George Cram served a number of refugee advocacy organizations, and successfully pushed for the granting of Canadian visas to released prisoners in Chile during the rule of dictator Augusto Pinochet. Photo: General Synod Archives, from the Anglican Journal, March 20 2018”

To honour George Cramm, who died last month, we publish below the notes of the speech he gave five years ago, to commemorate a unique moment in the history of refugees in Canada which he led, the Political Prisoner Program. We also reproduce the text of the obituary prepared by the Anglican Journal, which highlights the many institutions which benefited from his commitment to ecumenical social justice. We thank his close colleague and member of the CNHH, John Foster, for sharing these documents as well as the obituary published by the Toronto Star published an obituary on March 21. John first met George via United Church youth work in 1961, and was best man at his wedding.

Notes from a talk given by George Cram about […] The Political Prisoner Program

Solidarity for Chilean Diaspora at Carleton: Leonore Leon’s university

By Sandrine Murray

Full-length videos of the evening are below.

On Dec. 4, 2017, Carleton University’s department of history celebrated 45 years of involvement in the Chilean diaspora with an art exhibition of Chilean artist José Venturelli Eade. He went into exile after the country’s military coup in 1973, his murals and paintings representative of social revolution in Latin America.

Carleton University was the first Canadian university to welcome the exhibition, thanks to its involvement in welcoming and reaching out to Chilean refugees. Dictator Augusto Pinochet overthrew Salvador Allende in a coup d’état supported by the American government under Nixon, and as a result, many people fled, looking for refuge countries abroad and in Canada.

by Chloe Dennis

On Monday November 13, employees from Archives and Research Collections (ARC) at Carleton University’s MacOdrum Library visited Dr. John Foster’s home to collect the material he was donating to the ARC. The total amount of material equaled seventeen boxes and two bags worth of documents and ephemera.